Are we now bound only for relegation? Can we still string together a Sheffield United-like run of wins after January and avoid the drop? Or have we now confirmed that we are merely a Championship team, with a Championship manager, and a Championship mentality, whose biggest challenge this season will be to avoid "doing a Derby"?

Depends on who we buy in the transfer window, and how well they adapt to our system - which Brian is very reluctant to tinker with. I know we're looking into Arshavin, and there are a couple of other players we're speculating over.

Why are we looking into Arshavin? Our outside midfielders is probably our only strength, and I'm not convinced Arshavin is even good enough to start over McAnuf or McCleary. Plus Hal has been playing pretty well too, and there's still Jimmy Kebe. What does Arshavin bring to that set of wingers other than possibly making our lazy Russian striker and Russian owner happy?

I know Brian is reluctant to tinker but what other style of play could we change to without completely overhauling the team? The only thing I can think of is bringing Danny Guthrie back into the starting 11 as an attacking midfielder but that would put more pressure on Sean Morrison and Gunter or Cummings who are already prone to error.

I know Liverpool and others are going for Alex Pearce but I think at some point it's more important to keep one of our young center backs to keep some solidarity in the back four. I could really see Pearce-Morrison being one of the best back two pairings in the league in say 4-5 years. Then again I would have liked to have kept Matt Mills a while back too. I don't want to see a pattern of our backs trickling out as soon as they become ready to play at the top level.

For signings, I vote right back. Opponents know they can take advantage of that side of the field and continue to do so.

Look at it this way: Arshavin's career at Arsenal is over given they have one of the strongest midfield's in the league - and he is still a pretty good player when he gets regular action, couple that with his Premier League experience, and striking ability, he could prove to prove to be a huge asset to our team - and he wouldn't have the pressure of being compared to Arteta, Cazorla, Wilshere, Ramsey, Walcott and AOC.

We've got enough depth in our forward play that we could play a 4-5-1/4-2-3-1 or a 4-3-3 and switch easily enough between the two and a 4-4-2 without much difficulty.

Take the above, for example. You could easily enough switch out Guthrie for Alfie and Alfie for anyone of our other strikers. I reckon Pogrebnyak works better as a lone striker. Alfie & Hunt would have plenty of support for their runs behind the defense. Roberts, like Pavel could muscle through most defenses easy enough. Similar to MUFC, playing a second striker in a high(ish) CAM position can yield some great results, if they're switched on enough, like Rooney & RVP.

If you want to keep Guthrie on for his experience, switch him into Leigertwood's place, and (hypothetically) slot Arshavin into the CAM role, or HRK. We user our wing play well as it is, but I think it over streches our defensive midfield, and exposes a sometimes clumsy and inexperienced back four.

This is again useful enough to divert to a similar 4231 I showed earlier, or our standard 442 in either a flat or diamond format.

Certainly, our defense is the first thing that needs bolstering, and Federici's confidence to come back, but someone with Arshavin's ability and experience shouldn't be underestimated or seen as a bad thing - should we pursue him fully. As for who I'd buy into our defense - I'm not sure.

You're 4-5-1 (which we used a little bit at the beginning of the season) is pretty similar to our 4-4-1-1 with Guthrie swapped for a striker and the 4-3-3 seems more like an end of game aggressive push for when we need a goal. I don't necessarily think it starts with formation change but defensive style. I think we depend too much on Karacen/Tabb and Leigertwood as those defensive midfielders which ends up with us playing defense on the top of the 18 for more than half of a game. We're not bad at that but it's a strategy that is bound to concede eventually. I would really like to see an emphasis on a high line and defending from the front a bit more to see if we can win the ball in the opposition's half or force bad clearances, but to do that I think it requires a big game from Gorks and Morrison off of long balls and playing with one center midfielder who plays higher up the field. It's possible to do that with the players we have but it could end up with a very rough transition period where we give up a lot of goals. I'd like to see something like

---------------McCarthy--------------------

Gunter--Morrison--Gorks/Pearce--Shorey

-------------Leigertwood------------------

McCleary------Guthrie-------------McAnuf

----Alfie/Noel----------Roberts/Pogs-----

with an emphasis of preventing the opponent's back for from switching the field or easily being able to play out of the back.

For what it's worth, I would rather we went down this season, if it meant that in, say, 5 years, we could have the opportunity to re-establish ourselves in the Premier League.

We've been a yo-yo club for a long time now. This time 3 years ago, we were still fresh out of the Premier League and facing the prospect of life in League 1. 2 years before that, we were all thinking about the possibility of playing in the Europa League. It's been a crazy decade for the Royals.

I have no doubt we'll go down this season, but I don't mind. Everybody seems to believe that achieving stability within the Premier League is an immediate thing. I've seen what everyone has to say about the team in this situation, that we need more cover in defence/more creative midfielders/prolific strikers proven at this level/whatever. That could cost millions, and is, at the end of the day, a gamble. AZ didn't provide the massive kitty we were all expecting at the beginning of the summer, but he obviously knows something we don't. We still have that money, which is great, but we're bottom, which isn't great. But we can use that money to re-establish ourselves in the future, and isn't that what it's all about? We could spend in January, giving ourselves no guarantee of survival, crash back down into the Championship, lose all our players due the relegation clauses on their contracts, and be skint. Or, we could buy ourselves decent prospects, as we've always done, crash down with a team committed to Reading, and have enough money to rebuild for another promotion push. And in five years, who knows - we could be doing a Portsmouth, or we could be doing a West Brom.

In short, I still support McDermott, and don't believe that relegation will be the end of the world. This is the best period I've ever lived in to be a Royals fan, and I won't waste a single second of our stay in the Premier League moaning.

I agree. I think going really big in Janauary could cause a lot of problems down the road. Relegation doesn't mean we can't come back stronger in a year. We do have some good young talent who will be more ready for the premiership in a few years.

I think for the time being we should look at it this way. We have had a lot of away games recently and played extremely poor attacking and defending in those games. However look at all our home results, we've been brilliant attacking and if we can get Morrison and Pearce starting together we'll be stronger at the back. I say the Arsenal game will be a big factor of how we predict our season.